Blog Post 5: Chapters 11 and 12

Chapter eleven, Sharing Information with Families, focuses how to better communicate with parents. I really enjoyed reading this chapter because it gave great advice to teachers on how they should professionally respond to family members concerns regarding their child. There were sixteen commonly asked questions that parents have regarding their child. In the past, I’ve heard horrible stories of teachers responding in the “wrong way” to the parents of some of their students. I’ve even witnessed incidents where parents have become angry with their child’s teacher for responding in an unprofessional way. This chapter really guides teachers on what they can say in scenarios. A question that was listed as a concern a parent may have was: “It seems like my child just memorizes the books he brings home. Last night he even told me he could read it with his eyes closed. Is this okay?”. The response that was given to this parent’s question/concern was both encouraging to the parent and the child. Since I'm a substitute teacher, I personally do not get one-on-one meetings with parents, but when I worked at a summer school program I was always communicating with parents and ensuring the parents that their child was making progress.

Chapter twelve, Teachers Make the Difference, focuses on encouraging teachers to continue expanding their knowledge to help support struggling readers to improve. According to the text, “The generally accepted theory of how reading works is that reading consists of a number of skills that can be taught in some sequential manner”. The greatest thing I learned from this chapter is that in order to make a difference in the as an educator, I must change my way of thinking. Reading is a process and in order for a student to grow as a reader, they need help in building their reading process. “Many more teachers are starting to view reading as a process in the head of the reader and to understand that struggling readers need help in building that process”. The text list several possibilities of how teachers can begin to use this new way of thinking to make a difference in schools, teachers, and students. I plan to use all of the points given (p. 225), but the one I was able to use the most is: “Keeping track of the time that your struggling students are involved in real reading and writing. Is it as much time as your more able readers are spending engaged in authentic tasks?”. During this time, I could try working one-on-one with students to see where we need to focus more on.  

What You Need to Know About Assessments, Sharing Information with Families, and Making a Difference

For the last blog, I read chapters 10, 11, and 12 in Catching Readers Before They Fall. The authors talk about authentic, ongoing, and informative assessments. As teachers, we continually look for what readers can do and can almost do, and make a note of behaviors in order to provide support and guide your teaching decisions. Informal assessment tools include anecdotal notes taken during reading conferences or observing students. During conferences, teachers can look for what the child can do independently, what they can almost do, and what they can't do yet. Note-taking while observing allows us to see behaviors or patterns. Running records allow us to gain insight into which strategies are being used as well as the appropriate reading level for the student. Formal assessments include benchmarks, running records, and tests. Teachers usually use benchmark assessments at the beginning, middle, and end of the year in order to get information on a child's instruction level, comprehension, and fluency. "The more that we know about what students' strengths are and what they struggle with, the more closely we can match our instruction to what each child needs to learn next." Assessments ultimately inform our teaching. When assessments indicate that only some children need practice with a skill, then guided reading groups or conferences may be useful rather than teaching the whole class and repeating to other students. Every time that you instruct a struggling reader, you must help build his or her reading process system and ongoing, authentic, and informative assessment is what helps that to happen.

Chapter 11 focuses on sharing information with families. "The majority of parents are not educators and therefore they rely on us to inform them of how children best learn to read." It's our job to help families understand how they can help their children at home. This chapter is very useful because the authors wrote down common questions that families have and went through each of them to suggest ways that you can talk to parents about their child's progress. This will help strengthen the connection between home and school.

Chapter 12 reinforces that teachers make a difference. "School administrators and teachers alike should remain vigilant about finding ways to teach all children, no matter what their strengths and weaknesses." All children can learn. However, children learn at different rates and in different ways. Teachers must identify the needs of all of their students in order to provide the most effective instruction and maximize instructional time. Teachers have to change the world a little bit at a time.

Blog Post 4

I am continuing to read, Catching Young Readers Before They Fall. I gathered a lot of information from chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 focused on inferring and summarizing. The chapter states, "Some teachers may think inferring is predicting, but we believe it includes more than just predicting." Fountas and Pinnell says, "Readers who infer go beyond the literal meaning of a text to derive what is not there but is implied." There are many opportunities to infer when reading. These opportunities can derive from the setting, thoughts on characters personalities, a poems meaning, looking at the author's perspective, discovering the theme, determining a problem, discovering the meaning of new vocabulary, and when looking at figurative language. As teachers, we should stop during shared reading or read aloud books to ask questions and see what the students can infer about these different scenarios. They are using their thinking skills and what they already know so far about a book to infer what is happening. Inferring also helps build a readers comprehension skills. (Johnson and Keier 2010)

Chapter 10 focuses on assessment and looking closely at readers. The chapter says, "In order to know how our readers are progressing, we must be careful observers, constantly making decisions about how to use the information we gather to inform our instruction." The authors of this book believe that assessment must be authentic, ongoing, and informative in order for it to effectively be used by teachers. The chapter lists several different assessment tools including conferencing, anecdotal note taking, running records, developmental reading assessment, and beginner reading assessments. I think it is important to use a variety of assessment tools because if a student does not assess well one way, the teacher may be surprised if they use a different assessment tool. Students respond better to different tools so I think it is important to look at their reading abilities from more than one angle. (Johnson and Keier 2010)

Blog 4: Chapter 10-Assessment

According to Johnson and Keier (2010), "Formative, ongoing assessments by teachers and students
based on daily work need to be the mainstay." Our day to day teaching should not be determined by
results of standardized tests or computerized end of book tests because the data is just not enough to
guide instruction (Johnson and Keier, 2010). In this chapter, Johnson and Keier (2010) state that
literacy behaviors from students should be observed by teachers throughout the day during reading,
writing, and conferencing. Teachers should make notes on the behaviors they observe (Johnson and Keier, 2010). The observations show students who are struggling, as well as students who are ready to move on. I use this information in my classroom to determine my small groups, whether it is for text levels or reading strategies. In this chapter, I love this quote from Fountas and Pinnell, "You cannot see into children's minds, but their behaviors can guide your teaching decision" (Johnson and Keier, 2010). This quote means a lot to me because I believe when we observe our students reading behaviors and analyze the behaviors it shows us some of what goes on in their mind while reading. Based on the text, I agree that teachers should focus on all readers, but more time should be spent with the struggling readers. In my classroom, I meet with my struggling readers three times a week and my other groups one to two times a week. I assign my strong group of readers a book to read during the week. When they meet with me they discuss the book and strategies or skills they used while reading. When I work with my struggling readers, I model how to use strategies, and allow practice time as I listen to one child read a page or pages. Then, we discuss the strategies and how they were effective. Some of the assessment tools discussed were informal assessments such as anecdotal notes during conferences, shared reading, guided reading, and writing. Formal assessments discussed were benchmarks, running records, and adopted tests (Johnson and Keier, 2010). I actually thought running records were formal and informal. I thought running records from classroom leveled texts were informal, and assessments such as Fountas and Pinnell were the formal running records. This is something I am curious about. Although I have been teaching for six years I just learned the importance of conferences about two years ago. I would hear about it during professional development, but finally was show how to conduct a conference two years ago. This year my conferences are even better because I had a lot of practice. One "ah-ha" moment for me after reading the chapter was making sure the student is actually enjoying the book. I always focus on the strategies that I loss focus on the student's enjoyment. The text discussed the issue of finger pointing while reading. I can relate because I had a parent just this past week who asked me if it was okay to have his daughter point while she read because constantly loss her place or skipped lines while reading. I told him I do not encourage it because it slows down the reader. I told him to just encourage her to reread when he notices her error. Lastly, I like how this chapter discussed how to organize assessment data.. I am in the process of reorganizing my data notebook to include a binder with notebook tabs that include: class grid forms, class list for each month, guided reading planning sheet, and individual student forms. At my new school the data notebook was already created, but I plan to reorganize it to meet my expectations so that I can manage it better and monitor my students growth better.

Blog 4 No More Independent Reading Without Support

Blog 4

Making the Most of Independent Reading

The first directive is to provide a purpose for reading: What, How, and Why Readers Read. At first, I was wondering how one teacher could set an individual purpose for each reader and their books – IMPOSSIBLE! Now, I am thinking (and hoping) the author means students reading to practice the objective of the focus lesson.  

The author tells us to teach our students how to choose appropriate books and reminds us that the appropriate book is not always at the independent level. It depends on what the student’s purpose for reading is. The book could be on an instructional level if the student has extensive knowledge of the material or is highly motivated to read it.

It is also beneficial to show students what strategies readers use to make meaning of books by talking about your thinking as you have read alouds. Model how to talk about books with their peers just as you talk about books to your peers. Invite them to join in your discussion of the book as you read aloud. The author suggests the following books to help support independent talk: Questioning the Author (Beck et al. 1997), Reciprocal Teaching at Work (Oczkus 2010), Literature Circles(Daniels 2002).

After you model thinking aloud, choose a student to share something about the book they have read. Ask another student to expand upon the book talk by sharing “When you said . . . it made me think about . . .”

Another strategy to use is “Turn and talk.” The author says that turn and talk " . . . prepares students for student-led small group discussions . . ." You provide a prompt about a character in a read aloud for instance and the student turns and talks to their partner about that character. The teacher is supposed to move around the room and listen and guide, if necessary.

Tactics Teachers Can Use to Keep Things Hopping During IR

Have plenty of books. The author wonders why we should have 300 and not 1000. She says, "I'd strive for at least 1000 books and I wouldn't stop there." She says to look in book rooms whose keys have been forgotten, pick up text sets that are unused. Class libraries should have half fiction and have informational books. Many times, our libraries have many more fiction books. Organize the books according to subjects as well as instructional levels.

IR might only last for 10 to 15 minutes when you first begin. Make sure the students have instructional level books in their box as well as subject matter that they are interested in.

Monitor their IR. Look at the class as a whole to determine who might need to be refocused and ask them, “I’m noticing your having a hard time today. What’s going on? How can I help?” Don’t make it a punitive issue.

Blog Post 4: Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter nine, Spotlight on Inferring and Summarizing, focuses on ways to make sure students fully grasp the comprehension strategies taught to them. Comprehension strategies such as questioning, visualizing, inferring, and summarizing are discussed throughout this chapter. Chapter nine begins by giving great insight into how teachers incorporate whole class discussions and inferring on a daily basis during story time. A powerful statement that I found on reading stories to children is, “The beauty of storytelling is that the children have to create their own images, depending on the words of the story alone with no picture support. The point is to allow discussions to spring naturally from the ideas, confusions, connections, or questions that the students have”. In the past, I found it somewhat frustration when I would do storytelling or read-alouds with discussions throughout the story. I would always have students throw out comments that confused their classmates. The frustration would come from not knowing how to teach the students how to separate from making assumptions to making inferences. As the text stated, “Inferring is one strategy that we find often causes confusion for some teachers; it can be difficult to define and teachers can be unsure of how to teach for it”. The best way I learned to solve this issues is to model it for the students. I made inferences about a story as I read to the class.  

Before reading this chapter, I thought inferring was basically predicting, but inferring is much more than that. Inferring is basically figuring out something that the author doesn’t actually say within the story. Predicting is guessing and inferring is using context clues within a story to search for a fact. An example of inferring from the chapter is: “We read this sentence to any class of students-“The children put on their mittens and scarves and went out in the snow to play-then ask them, “What season is it?” and they always know it is winter”. This chapter raised my awareness of inferring and its importance.

After chapter nine focuses on inferring, the next focus is on teaching summarizing to students. From the text, I learned how to successfully model summarizing for young students. “When a reader summarizes he or she: deletes unimportant information, highlights important words or phrases, and puts ideas in his or her own words. Students need to hear you think aloud and see you do these things: cross out extra and/or repeated words, circle important words and phrases, and write in the margins”. I incorporated this into the classroom this week by modeling how to summarize exactly the way the text instructs. Then, I assigned the students to think about a book they recently read and to summarize the books or story in their notebooks. I reminded the students to tell the main ideas of the story without giving away the ending of the story. Since I was with second graders, I did walk them through this by asking questions such as: “What is the main ideas in the story? What are some important details in your story? How do you know they are important? Did these details cause a problem in the story?”. This assignment went very well. I only had a couple of students who needed one-on-on or small group support in completing this assignment.

Chapter ten, Assessment: Looking Closely at Readers, focuses on different aspects of assessing. The main point of this chapter is making sure the assessments used in the classroom are authentic, ongoing, and informative. Taking notes is a part of every guided reading lesson, and reflecting on the anecdotal notes allows us to see patterns and behaviors that change over time (p.182). Since I technically never had my own classroom with the same students, I do find it to be overwhelming to think about organizing all the assessment information on my students. I’ve been in classrooms where the teacher used sticky notes for everything, but that never seemed like a good idea. It only caused their desk to look like a complete mess in my opinion. The organizational technique I learned about in this chapter that I would like to adopt into the classroom would be the class grid for each subject taught, the monthly class list for reading, and the individual student forms (pgs. 191-194). The examples given in the text for thee organizational techniques appear to be very effective

What You Need to Know About Comprehension, Inferring, and Summarizing

Continuing with reading Catching Readers Before They Fall, I am going to be talking about chapters 8 and 9 in this blog. Chapter 8 focuses on whether or not strategies should be explicitly taught in order for students to understand and use them. Every student develops a system that will help him or her comprehend texts and many average readers, and especially struggling readers, will need support. Peter Johnson states that "we have to decide what to be explicit about for which students and when to be explicit about it." The need for explicit strategy instruction is higher for struggling readers, so we need to explicitly teach it to them and not as much to more advanced readers. However, we need to continuously encourage students to use strategies that they already know how to use, even if we are only focusing on a certain strategy at that time. We need to be present in order to support problem-solving attempts made by the student. With comprehension strategies, some students need to be walked through how a reader makes connections or questions or visualizes during reading. For some students, the process may start slowly before it speeds up and they are doing this often. Modeling strategies is one of the best ways for children to understand how to utilize them. For example, if a teacher begins to read to her students, she may not introduce the strategy "questioning," but she talks about what she is reading and models questions that she has in order to understand what she is going to read. "The goal is not naming a strategy, but applying it to the reading of text." The example for "visualizing" is similar. While reading, the teacher stops and talks about what she is visualizing from reading the text or what she is visualizing from prior knowledge to reading. "One goal should be for students to feel the strategy working for them-they will only take ownership of the strategy and incorporate it into their reading process system if they feel it has value for them."

This leads us into chapter 9, which continues to focus on strategies, but puts a spotlight on inferring and summarizing. It is important for students to have inferential thinking in order to understand pas the literal surface level of the texts. It is reemphasized that it is more important for students to infer while reading rather than know the name or definition for it. "We keep the focus of the lesson on comprehension and then have the students notice how we went about acquiring meaning." This will also help students to be able to do this independently. Students can learn to infer at the word level (meaning of new terms), the text level (predicting what might happen or inferring about the characters or plot), and beyond text level (theme, perspective, etc.). Of course, we want them to be able to infer on all levels as much as possible because inferring is closely related to comprehending. The book gives tons of books that can be used for inferring on pages 165-172. Summarizing is another strategy discussed in this chapter, especially on tests. In order to model summarizing, it's important for students to see unnecessary information crossed out, important facts highlighted, and the information rewritten in your own words. All of the strategies mentioned within these chapters are very important. However, it's more important that the students know how to use a strategy rather than know the name for that strategy.